Though Berluti turns 120 in 2015, Alessandro Sartori wanted no references to the past in his show tonight. Sure, the setting was the classic surroundings of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, but the catwalk and backdrop were mirrored—"sharp and modern," said Sartori—and the clothes had a more active, younger image than the exercises in connoisseurship with which the designer established Berluti as a clothing label. One inspiration was jogging. Most of the trousers had ribbed cuffs, and 80 percent of the collection was cut from felted jersey in seven different weights. "A new generation of fabrics," Sartori called them. They allowed him to perform feats of deconstruction that created unlined blazers as soft as cardigans and so light that they could be layered up without any bulk.
The same lightness distinguished trenches in coated silk, and jackets woven from cashmere hand-loomed with leather to make a tweed. A blue version wove together cashmere with Japanese indigo silk. Cashmere knits were airbrushed, printed, and warmed, which made the pigment eat into the fiber to create a worn-in look, the idea always being to defuse any connotation of preciousness. Same with the closing looks—tailcoats worn with crewnecks. It was a stylist's way to make a point, but it underscored Sartori's position in menswear, somewhere near Véronique Nichanian at Hermès, both of them bringing a casually contemporary but completely seductive quality to the uppermost strata of luxury.
If the deconstructed jackets were clear winners, it was still Sartori's way with color that left the most lasting impression. The collection was dark-toned—Sartori felt that, too, was more modern—but it only made layers of tone-on-tone green sing. An orange trench was, quite literally, a standout.
